Scrapbook for June

13.06.2026 – Anthem for the summer

We'll see how the Swiss vote tomorrow on the proposal to limit the population of Switzerland to ten million. Seems a bit on the high side to me – I think it was about six million when I arrived all those years ago. It's true: where I lead, others follow.

Just as in Britain, Europe and the USA, random, often deadly violence is becoming more common in Switzerland, although the authorities are just as active in clamping down on citizen unrest over perceived threats.

The bias of the authorities in Britain as they attempt to keep a lid on public anger, which they have been doing in some way or other since the sixties, is clear to everyone with eyes, ears and a brain. The people of Northern Ireland, practised rioters and insurgents, appear to be showing the rest of Britain how it is done. The UK government response is just making things worse:

@Michael Hennessey/X

Every summer since the sixties has had its anthem. We have come a long way since since that summer of love when we were urged to put flowers in our hair. There's a bad moon on the rise.

11.06.2026 – JD's chicken coop

A few days ago, a propos the generalised practical incompetence of our political masters, I quoted Ezra Pound's sturdy opinion: 'War, one war after another. / Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost' [Canto XVIII, p. 83].

Today brings news that the grace and favour residence of the Vice President and his family, the US Naval Observatory, has been gifted with a chicken coop by the North Carolina company, Carolina Coops.

Admittedly, he didn't build it himself, but it's a start. I don't think this is quite what Ezra had in mind for his 'hen-roost'.

I can only say that if I had been given something like this I would make it my home and put the chickens in my current hovel.

08.06.2026 – Jesus shall reign

For some reason, this hymn popped into my head this morning:

Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His Kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748), written 1719. I don't know who wrote the music, which is (I believe) called'Truro'.

St Michael's Singers in Coventry Cathedral, Paul Leddington Wright (conductor).

That such stuff still fills my atheist brain is not really a surprise. I had long years of singing this in church and in morning assemblies in school. It has obviously been burned in, never to be removed.

The tune is singable, but this morning, while waiting for my coffee to dribble through the filter, I fell to thinking about the words.

The sentiment was sort of true when Watts wrote it in 1719, midway through the colonial expansion of Britain and the West in general. The sun never set on the far-flung British Empire and its religion was flung far and wide with it. The song 'Rule, Britannia!' was written in 1740, around twenty years after 'Jesus shall reign' and embodies the same buccaneering spirit.

It is not true now.

'Never glad confident morning again!'(©Browning) in Britain or Europe. There may still be places around the world where Jesus reigns, but they seem to be becoming fewer.

We think of the bloodthirsty genocide of Christians currently going on on the African continent – if ever there were a just cause for a Crusade against the infidel it is there, but Christians in Europe don't seem terribly perturbed about the gruesome fate of their co-religionists.

Ditto the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. Since Christianity is part of the larger Judeo-Christian tradition, one would have thought that European Christians would seize their 'swords of burning gold' (©Blake). There may still be places around the world where Jesus reigns, but they seem to be fading fast.

The Christian core of the West, with the exception of the USA perhaps, continues to shrink, both numerically and morally. The New-Europeans are mostly not Christian and their religions seem much more vibrant that today's diffident and tentative Christianity. Christians won't have to wait very long for their demographic and spiritual extinction – one, perhaps two generations at the most.

The source of this Christian enervation and the start of the decline into feebleness can be dated quite precisely: 1962 to 1965, the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). The Council nominally tweaked a few bits of Catholic dogma, but what it really did was to set off a much wider movement throughout much of Christendom (Catholic and Protestant) that validated the new social and cultural progressivism that flourished in the 1960s.

Among many other things, this movement relativised all faiths into a single ecumenical mush, at least in the heads of Christians. What used to be heretical in the good old days of burning at the stake was now OK – encouraged, even, and we thus landed in the diversity swamp. There was to be no criticism of other religions, however bizarre they might be to Enlightenment tastes: that was 'bigotry'.

Mohammedans in particular suddenly found tolerance, even accceptance, without the need to swing swords. Sikhs, Hindus and Buddhists all have their touchy aspects, but Mohammedanism is founded upon a culture of war, conquest and submission.

I use the term 'Mohammedanism', since that is the word I learned in school. It is a term in use in English at least since 1663, some time before my schooldays. The OED tells me not to use it, citing a 1992 opinion that 'The term Mohammedan..is considered offensive or pejorative to most Muslims since it makes human beings central in their religion, a position which only Allah may occupy'. The argument is specious and I am shocked – though unsurprised – that the woke OED propagates such nonsense so uncritically. They don't worry when the followers of the religion of Christ are called Christians.